Deal Diary: You’re Never Too Old to Chase FIRE

In This Article

Name
Neil Whitney

Location
Picayune, Mississippi

Occupation
HVAC business owner & real estate investor

Assets
23 doors (2 fourplexes, 6 duplexes, 3 single-family homes)

Investment strategy
Long-Term Rentals

Financing
Conventional loans & HELOCs

At age 47, Neil Whitney was running an HVAC company in Slidell, Louisiana, and working every hour he had. He and his wife weren’t struggling in any dramatic way. They were just stuck living paycheck to paycheck, with no cushion and no retirement plan.

Then one rainy weekend, his wife dragged him to the back room to watch a Lifetime movie. A man gets hit by a dump truck, loses his job, and ends up living in a minivan under a bridge with his family. It freaked Neil out, and he felt like he was one bad accident away from being like that guy.

The next Monday, his boss happened to hand him a copy of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. After reading, he told his wife that they needed to get into real estate. She said fine, but on one condition: He couldn’t touch their bank account. So he signed up for Uber, and 18 months later, he had $16,000 saved and bought his first rental property.

Less than a decade later, Neil owns 23 doors and clears $8,000 a month in passive income. Here’s how he did it.

You had no savings and couldn’t touch your bank account. How did you fund your first deal?

I drove Uber every free moment I had: Friday nights, Saturdays, Sundays. I had a spot near a swamp tour that came in every day at 11, and I’d grab that airport run into the city every single week.

After about 18 months, I had saved enough to buy a little 900-square-foot, two-bedroom house in Pearl River, Louisiana, for $70,000. I put $14,000 down on a conventional loan. The previous owner had already fixed it up with new tile, crown molding, and fresh paint, so we were able to rent it out for around $800 a month and cleared about $100 after the mortgage. It wasn’t life-changing money, but we were in the game.

How did you go from one single-family home to 23 doors?

The second deal changed everything. I discovered how much equity I had built in my primary home and pulled a HELOC to buy a fourplex listed on the MLS for $312,000. Put 25% down using that line of credit, kept the tenants already in place at $650 per unit, and renovated each unit as people moved out with new cabinets, countertops, and vanities.

Our rents went from $650 to $1,000 per unit. The fourplex now brings in $4,000 a month. We paid off the HELOC pretty fast and kept repeating the same formula: Find a deal on the market, buy it with conventional financing, fix it up over time, raise the rents, repeat.

What do you tell someone who thinks they’re too old or too broke to start?

Make a decision. Not “I’ll try.” Just make a real decision.

At 47, I had nothing. I drove Uber in the middle of the night to scrape together my first down payment. Nobody handed me anything. But I decided I was never going to be that guy in the movie, and I never looked back.

If I can do this, anybody can. The basics really do work. You buy properties, get them to cash flow, treat your tenants like the best customers you ever had, and never sell.

It’s not rocket science. It’s just boring fundamentals executed consistently over a long period of time.